7 December 2006 was a rainy day in London. A few people gathered at Highgate Cemetery for the funeral of Alexander Litvinenko. They were met at the entrance by cameramen and photographers, who were not allowed in by the police. Boris Berezovsky was among the small group of people who gathered at the coffin of the deceased, in the company of the exiled Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev. Litvinenko’s father also came from Russia, and his half-brother Maxim from Italy.
They all gathered around the widow Marina Litvinenko. Berezovsky’s colleague Alex Goldfarb told them in a whisper that it took a good two weeks for the British authorities to allow the burial of the deceased. As soon as he died, his body was taken to an unknown location and the hospital was disinfected. The pathologists who carried out the autopsy were reportedly wearing anti-radiation equipment, he added. Only after all this had been done was the body handed over to the family in a specially welded coffin, and the widow was told that if she chose to be cremated, the ashes would not be handed over to her until twenty-seven years later, when the level of radiation from the radioactive waste had been sufficiently reduced.
After the funeral, the British and world public calmed down. For London, Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who had sought political asylum in the UK, was still just a foreigner, even though the authorities had granted him and his family British citizenship. London was only disturbed by the way in which he was murdered and the belief that the licence to kill him must have come from the Kremlin itself. This was not the first time that London had seen someone die on British soil under unexplained circumstances.
This kind of murder certainly required careful planning. The officer in charge had to draw up an operational plan, choose the weapons, the place and time of the murder, and prepare a backup scenario in case something went wrong. The plan had to be approved by the head of Moscow’s Department 8 of Directorate S, responsible for sabotage abroad, and then sought approval from the Kremlin.
KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who was involved in the assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, explained the planning process in detail. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of KGB intelligence, was summoned in 1978 by Bulgarian Interior Minister Stoyanov and asked to help him eliminate Markov, who had been granted political asylum in the UK and headed the BBC’s Bulgarian desk there. General Kalugin asked for help from the KGB’s Technical Directorate, which had Laboratory 12, which was looking for ways to murder a man without leaving any trace of the cause of death.
In the case of the Marks, they ended up choosing between three options; poisonous gelatine stuck to the skin, poisoned food or drink, and the launch of a lethal pill. They chose the pill and put in the deadly ricin, a derivative of castor oil. The toxicologists had little experience with it, but they knew that it was very slow-acting and that the killer would therefore be safe somewhere over the border long before the victim died.
KGB agents go to Sofia with two poison pills. One was tested on a horse, which died immediately, and the other was used on a death row inmate. An officer of the Bulgarian Minister of the Interior approached him with an umbrella, the point of which had been converted into a rifle, and shot him. The convict screamed as if he had been stung by a bee and remained alive, as the ricin was not expelled from the pill. The attackers could not hide their disappointment and the KGB laboratory went back to work.
Markov has been Bulgaria’s number one enemy of the state since he defected in 1969. His books were withdrawn from libraries and his name removed from films, and he made fun of the communist leader Zhivkov on the BBC. Soon he was threatened by phone, and finally he received a phone call from someone in Munich telling him that he had been targeted.
On 28 August 1878, ten days before the assassination, the KGB tested the new weapon on one more victim. Vladimir Kostov was a former officer of the Bulgarian Security Service, now working as a journalist in Paris. One sunny day, he was standing on the escalator leading out of the metro under the Arc de Triomphe when he felt a stab in his back and noticed a man running away with an umbrella in his hands. This attack also failed, the reason being that Kostov was wearing a thicker jumper that day and the pill could not penetrate deep enough into his body.
On 7 September 1978, at half past two in the afternoon, Georgi Markov approached a London bus stop at the southern end of Waterloo Bridge. Pedestrians brushed against him as he gazed thoughtfully at the River Thames. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in the back of his thigh muscle. He turned and saw a man bending down to pick up an umbrella. “Excuse me,” he said to him in a strong foreign accent. The next moment a taxi drove past, the man quickly jumped in and disappeared. While Markov was dying in the hospital, he described this strange accident to the doctors, but no one even suspected an assassination, and so they could not find out why Markov’s health was deteriorating.
“When he arrived at the hospital, he complained of nausea and vomiting, and he also had a high fever, but it was nothing unusual. Then his condition suddenly deteriorated and on 11 September 1978 at 10.40 Mr Markov died,” the hospital explained. The Bulgarian diaspora in London was shocked, no one believed he had died a natural death. Markov’s story soon landed on the front pages of newspapers and on TV news.
The police did not know what to do; there was no motive and no signs of a violent death. The autopsy also showed nothing suspicious, so they sent a piece of tissue from the puncture to a laboratory in Porton Down. Using an electron microscope, they found a tiny pilule of platinum alloy and iridium with two small holes in it, but unfortunately it was empty.
When Vladimir Kostov heard about the tragic death of his friend Markov, he remembered that he too had experienced a similarly unusual encounter and immediately informed the French police, who in turn informed Scotland Yard. French doctors cut out a piece of tissue from his back and sent him to London. There, they excised the almost intact pilule. The ricin had already broken down, but it was still possible to find out which poison was causing such terrible consequences.
In 1992, General Vladimir Todorov, the former head of Bulgarian intelligence, flew to Moscow and took with him the entire Markov dossier. Fifteen years later, journalists dug up that Markov’s likely killer was Francesco Gullino, a Dane of Italian origin. They found that he had travelled extensively in Europe in a car with Austrian licence plates, and concluded that the Vienna branch of the KGB had played an important role in Markov’s murder. It employed a man who controlled Markov’s movements, very probably also at the BBC. Suspicion fell on another Bulgarian working at the radio station, 30-year-old Vladimir Simeonov. Twenty days after Marko’s death and two days before he was to be questioned by Scotland Yard, he was found dead. He is believed to have fallen down the stairs at night and suffocated in his own blood.
In 1993, Gullin was tracked down by the British in Copenhagen, interrogated and found in possession of a large number of forged passports. He admitted to working for Bulgarian intelligence, but denied involvement in Markov’s murder. Until 1990, he was still on the payroll of the Bulgarian secret service and received a regular salary. He was released by the Danes after questioning, as he had done nothing illegal for them. Until 2006, he visited Copenhagen regularly, stating on entry that he lived in Budapest.
Poison factory
On 30 August 1918, Lenin was assassinated by Fania Kaplan, who fired three bullets at him, allegedly poisoned with curare. Lenin survived, but Kaplan was shot and cremated in an oil drum three days later without a trial. When Lenin felt a little better, he was informed that curare was an extract from South American plants. The word itself is a compound of Tupi words and means “to kill a bird”. Lenin was impressed by what he heard and three years later he set up the first secret poison laboratory.
In the chaotic period around 1990, historians managed to unearth a few documents explaining the history of the Moscow poison factory. The laboratory was headed by Professor Kazakov from the beginning until 1938, when he disappeared in Stalin’s purges. Many scientists from the now famous Bach Institute of Biochemistry also worked with the laboratory. After a number of reorganisations, two departments – the chemical and bacteriological laboratories – were created from the factory and after 1946 moved to premises near the infamous NKVD (the forerunner of the KBG) headquarters on Lubyanka.
Vasily Blokin, the head of the Lubyanka prison and chief NKVD executor, supplied the laboratories with prisoners. In the beginning, they experimented with mustard poison iperite, but it was detectable, so they did not warm up to it. Moscow needed a poison that could not be found in the victim’s body. Later, they started experimenting with ricin, digitoxin and curare, and finally decided on K-2 poison, which killed the victim in fifteen minutes.
In February 1954, a man in a crumpled suit entered the American barracks in Vienna and introduced himself as Major Deriabin, a member of the KGB in Vienna and a former officer of the elite Kremlin Company. The Americans immediately summoned a Russian-speaking CIA officer and began interrogating him. Deriabin told them everything he knew about the nerve agent laboratory. He reported that the main experiments with poisons were carried out in the so-called Room (Kamera). The laboratory was developing and scientists were regularly awarded Stalin’s prizes for their research achievements. Experiments were carried out on prisoners or those condemned to death, and some of the poisons caused extreme suffering. To reduce the screams of the unfortunates, loudspeakers were installed in the laboratory and loud music was played. When the poison did not work, an injection was used.
In October 1953, the Soviet authorities announced to a select few that they would close the laboratory, blaming the excesses on the former head of the KGB, Lavrenti Beria. The closure of the laboratory was, of course, a lie, since the experiments carried out there had merely been incorporated into another department. So the work continued, and after Stalin’s death, the new collective leadership (Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin and Khrushchev) had already received a report on the death of Leon Trotsky’s former secretary Wolfgang Salus.
It was poisoned in February 1953. A few days after the poisoning, he died in agony in a Munich hospital, and his death did not arouse suspicion. The doctors were convinced that he had died of pneumonia. His murderer was named Otto Freitag, and in 1949 the East German Stasi successfully absorbed him into the rest of Trotsky’s circle of followers.
In the 1960s, the poisons laboratory was still operating, but under the name LabX, and the poisons were used against “enemies of the people living in exile in Europe”. In February 1954, Nikolai Koklov is said to have organised the murder of a Russian dissident, who was killed by a poisoned bullet fired from a weapon hidden in a cigarette packet. However, Koklov defected to the CIA and almost paid with his life. He was punished by being poisoned, but survived.
Five years before the tragic events in London and Litvinenko’s death, and one year after the Soviet Union signed the Biological Weapons Convention, a new laboratory, Biopreparat, was set up, officially to produce pharmaceuticals, but in reality to manufacture and develop biological weapons in more than ten separate complexes. According to some reports, the Soviet Union had the most extensive programme for the production of such weapons, employing some 25,000 people.
They produced so-called “soft” and “deadly” poisons. Soft poisons, such as SP-17, did not kill, but once the victim had received it, he or she was ready to tell everything, including his or her biggest secrets. In addition, SP-17 had no smell, no colour, no side effects and the victim had no memory of anything afterwards. It was often used against their own agents who returned home after a long stay abroad to check whether they had become double agents.
But they also made deadly poisons in the laboratory – chemical, biological and radiological. Over the years, they were refined and changed, but they were always made to make death look natural or to leave traces that confused the investigators.
The killer rang the bell
One evening in the winter of 1954, the doorbell rang at the apartment in Frankfurt where Georgy Sergeyevich Okolovich, one of the leaders of the anti-Soviet émigré organisation NTS, was staying. Okolovich opened the door and saw a stranger standing in front of it, who said to him, “I am a captain of the Military Intelligence Service (MGB) and I have been sent from Moscow to kill you. I don’t want to do this and I need your help.”
The man who asked for help was Nikolai Yevgenyevich Koklov, born in 1922 and an actor by profession. Recruited by the secret police as a young actor to stalk Moscow’s intelligentsia, he was intended to be used for undercover work in German-speaking countries because of his blond hair and blue eyes. After the end of World War II, he was sent as a secret agent to Austria, where Soviet intelligence services were trying to fill the Austrian police and security services with their agents.
Koklov now had an Austrian passport with the name Josef Hofbauer on it. In 1952, however, Moscow became worried that Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, who had been at the head of the provisional Russian government from July to October 1917, would take over the leadership of all anti-Soviet groups in Europe. They decided that he should be liquidated. In March 1952, Koklov was sent to Paris, where he was to be taken to the victim by their agent Prince Gagarin.
The deadly weapon that would end the life of old Kerensky was a Parker fountain pen converted into a small pistol. However, since Kerensky had failed to take over the leadership of the anti-Soviet groups and was therefore no longer a serious threat, the operation was called off. Instead, Koklov was sent to Karlshorst in East Berlin, which at the time was the largest operational base of Soviet intelligence in Europe.
In September 1953, he was informed that he was to be sent to West Germany to liquidate one of the leaders of the anti-Soviet NTS organisations. In fact, his task was to coordinate the whole operation, which was to be carried out directly by two German agents. Vienna was to be merely a base in which to prepare for the liquidation.
Koklov and two agents travelled to Frankfurt by different routes. Virtually all Russian immigrant organisations at the time were “intercepted” by Moscow agents. Even the potential victim Okolovich had long been on Moscow’s list of people to get rid of. They had already tried to kidnap him in 1951 and three East German agents, equipped with ampoules of morphine, injections and a large quantity of German marks, had already crossed the zonal border and taken up residence near Limburg. However, two of the agents immediately surrendered to the authorities and the third managed to escape. A new opportunity did not present itself until July 1953, when Okolovic moved to Frankfurt. The Russian agent soon found out where he lived, what kind of car he drove and how he moved, and even managed to take a photograph of him.
Under the circumstances, it was very unprofessional of Okolovic to immediately open the door to a foreigner who rang the bell. When Koklov told him that Koklov was his killer, they looked at each other for a while without saying a word. Okolovic looked like a haggard professor in his fifties, while Koklov was twenty years younger, erect and determined. Okolovich broke the silence, saying, “If that’s the case, then come in and we’ll have a cup of tea.” Thus ended Operation Rhein, but soon Koklov began to experience a real adventure, as he became a target of the Russian secret service.
It is not known what he and Okolović agreed. Koklov returned to his apartment, met his two agents the next day and handed them a cigarette butt converted into a firearm, small revolvers with silencers and poison pills. All this was to be placed in luggage containers at Frankfurt train station. It was agreed that if Koklov did not appear at the station at the agreed time, one of them would rush immediately to Berlin and the other would return to Vienna.
US intelligence officers immediately began interrogating him. He suggested that they observe his meeting with the agents, and indeed they were soon arrested. Koklov suggested that they switch sides, as they had no other way out anyway, and they immediately accepted the offer, while he himself, at the request of the Americans, kept informing his supervisor in Vienna that the action was somewhat delayed. The replies he was getting back suggested that the Russians had no idea.
It was a sunny day after Easter in Bonn when Koklov stood in front of the press. Everyone was nervous. They put him between the head of the Voice of America’s European desk and an interpreter. Nobody asked any questions, and at the same time Voice of America started its programme in Russian, the main point of which was Koklov’s defection. After the press conference, he was invited to London to give lectures, and in May 1954 he was already sitting in an American military plane flying to Washington. In September 1957, he returned to Europe to take part in a meeting of anti-communist activists from all over the world at the Frankfurt Botanical Gardens.
On the last day of the meeting, he briefly greeted the assembled crowd, then went to the bar and ordered a coffee. He drank half a cup and felt very tired. Convinced that this was the result of the last three hard days, he ordered more fruit juice, but after just one sip he felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He decided to go to the concert anyway, but he felt worse and worse. He thought a bit of fresh air would do him good. He barely managed to get to his hotel and fainted.
When he regained consciousness, his heart was racing and he was shaking with fever. Someone called a doctor and he was taken to hospital. The doctors found that he had gastritis and no one thought he had been poisoned. He was treated for acute inflammation for five days, but he still felt worse and worse, his arms and legs started to ache and he was losing body fluids very quickly. Then his hair started to fall out and his skin turned yellow.
A skin doctor cautiously mentioned thallium poisoning. Koklov now no longer doubted who had planned and carried out the attack on him. A few days later, the doctors noticed that his white blood cell count was dropping sharply. The blood in his body was slowly turning into useless plasma. The glands in his throat, mouth and digestive tract were drying up. He was on the verge of death. But unlike Litvinenko, he was lucky and survived. He was transferred from the University Clinic in Frankfurt to a US military hospital, where special treatment was started. He was given antibiotics, steroids and a bunch of other drugs. His blood count started to improve, but he lost all his hair and body hair.
After a month, he left the hospital cured. Clinical examinations and symptoms pointed to radioactive thallium poisoning and possibly other substances. He stayed in America and decided to study psychology, which he completed. In 2004, Russian President Boris Yeltsin pardoned him of high treason and only then did he dare to visit Moscow again.
Ukrainian patient
On Orthodox New Year’s Day, 13 January 2005, University Professor Dr Korpan, a widely respected surgeon at the Vienna University Clinic, was already a consultant physician to Viktor Yushchenko, the future President of Ukraine. Only a few months before, he had saved his life and thus helped him to win the elections. Four months earlier, in September 2004, Dr Korpan, who was Ukrainian by origin, had received a telephone call from an aide to Viktor Yushchenko asking if he would see a patient who would be arriving from Kiev on a regular flight the same night.
When Dr Korpan arrived at Vienna’s Schwechat Airport at night, the plane from Kiev had not yet arrived. It was to arrive late. To avoid wasting time, he telephoned the clinic to ask them to reinforce the on-call service, as he was expecting an important patient. The plane from Borispol in Ukraine had indeed arrived very late. Among the few passengers were three security guards supporting a man who introduced himself as Yushchenko. “Doctor, my back hurts a lot. Can you help me?” were his first words.
He was quickly pushed into the back seat of a car, which sped off towards the clinic. The medical team on duty was not made up of forensic experts, but it was the best first aid team in Austria. Quick laboratory analyses showed that the patient had a lot of toxins in his system, so they immediately started detoxification procedures, which did not produce any results. They also found inflammation of the alimentary canal. Yushchenko’s liver and intestines were affected, as were his skin and nervous system.
Those months were very turbulent in Ukraine. Yushchenko was not at all to Moscow’s liking and, as a presidential candidate, he feared for his life, so he surrounded himself with a group of security guards who accompanied him even when he was on holiday in Crimea.
On 28 August, Volodymyr Satsiyuk, Assistant Director of the Ukrainian SBU security service, was seen in Moscow meeting his Russian counterparts. On his return from Moscow, he immediately suggested to Yushchenko that they meet to discuss the security situation just before the presidential elections. They met in a dacha near Kiev, and during the meeting Satyusk is said to have observed Yushchenko’s habits, his reactions and the actions of his security guards. The Ukrainian SBU also received a lot of information from its Moscow counterparts.
After the meeting, they agreed on how to remove Yushchenko, and a poison was prepared for him in the laboratory. The SBU support unit was to remove everything from the scene that could allow investigators to find out what had actually happened. A special team was also on standby in case something went wrong and it was necessary to intervene.
On 5 September, Yushchenko arrived in Chernogov to speak to his supporters. He then accepted a lunch invitation from an acquaintance and was informed by his assistant Zhvania that he was to meet the SBU security service in a dacha to tell them how he intended to deal with the security issue if he was elected President of Ukraine. On the way there, for some unknown reason, his security guards were recalled.
In the dacha, Yushchenko was served dinner, during which he also drank a lot. When Yushchenko returned home, he began to suffer from an unbearable headache and vomited violently. Doctors concluded that his gastrointestinal tract was inflamed. As this was a very dangerous disease, they wanted to take him to the government hospital Feofanio, but the head of his security service resisted, knowing that in the previous regime many politicians treated there had left the hospital in a coffin. But the doctors demanded that the patient be transferred, as they now suspected pancreatitis.
The head of Yushchenko’s security service, Chervonenko, was convinced that the only solution was medical treatment abroad. He called media tycoon Vadim Rabinovich, who had a private jet, and asked for help. But where to go? A private clinic in Geneva was ready to see the patient, but only after twenty-four hours, and in Israel he could only be helped after three days. So they called Dr Korpan in Vienna and he was ready to help immediately. So Yushchenko, his wife, eight-month-old son and three security guards, headed by Chervonenko, were on the plane.
The next day, his health deteriorated further and his face took on strange features. He was still being treated for pancreatitis, acute stomach ulcers and an unknown skin condition.
Boris Berezovsky called him from London and asked him to return to Kiev as the crucial days of the presidential campaign were approaching. He did return to Kiev on 18 September and resumed his election campaign. However, he did not stay long in Ukraine. The results of the blood tests carried out by Dr Korpan were so bad that his life hung in the balance. He had to return to Vienna for medical treatment.
The doctors still did not think it was poisoning. On 7 October, a catheter was inserted into his spine and finally one of the doctors dared to say: ‘I don’t know what happened to the patient. It could have been anything, including some kind of biological poison. We need a quick investigation in the best laboratory in the world, otherwise we will lose the patient.”
Yushchenko felt better after the difficult surgery and the doctors allowed him to return to Kiev to address his supporters. Before going to the podium, he received two strong injections and was able to speak to his supporters for 25 minutes without a catheter in his spine. Despite this, they noted that his face was completely changed, almost unrecognisable. Ukrainian doctors who were ready to help him in moments of crisis were not allowed access to the patient by the authorities. What is more, they were threatened with the loss of their jobs.
While Yushchenko was travelling from the Vienna hospital to Kiev and back again, the hospital issued an official announcement that they were investigating the possibility of external poisoning, but could not say whether it was deliberate or accidental. Dr Korpan told a press conference that police in Kiev had searched Yushchenko’s apartment and questioned neighbours. Austrian police were also active. They drove up to the Vienna hospital with sirens blaring and tried to seize Yushchenko’s medical records.
In October, Yushchenko had a skin tissue sample taken and sent to Vienna for tests. There, they found that the patient’s illness was probably linked to toxic exposure to dioxin, about which they knew almost nothing at the time. The concentration of dioxin in his body was 5000 times higher than normal.
Three days before the presidential elections, a military parade was held in Kiev, attended by Prime Minister and pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin. This was clearly Moscow’s pressure on the outcome of the elections. Nevertheless, in the second round and after street protests by thousands of Ukrainians over the fraudulent elections, Viktor Yushchenko won. But before he could celebrate his electoral victory, he had to go back to the hospital in Vienna, where it was finally confirmed that he had been poisoned by dioxin, a poison that had been produced in a Russian laboratory only a few years earlier.
On 23 January 2005, Viktor Yushchenko was sworn in as President of Ukraine and Yulia Tymoshenko became Prime Minister. It subsequently came to light that in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia, only a very small circle of experts were aware of the information on dioxin research, and it was produced in only two state laboratories.
Litvineneko becomes a target
Some people become famous for how they lived, but Alexander Litvinenkoo became famous for how he died. The general public first heard of him in November 1998, when he attended a meeting with a group of FSB officers, at which his assistant commander said: ‘We are a special task force. Have you read this book?”
He was holding a copy of the book Special Tasks, written as a memoir by Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the NKVD under Stalin. “This is our model. We should all read it. We have difficult tasks ahead of us. There are people, criminals, who cannot be got rid of in the normal way. They are filthy rich and can buy their freedom in court. You, Litvinenko, know Berezovsky, do you not? You will have to get rid of him.”
At the time, Vladimir Putin had been head of Russia’s FSB secret service for four months. Those who spoke out about the content of the talks were immediately fired and the unit disbanded. In March 1999, Litvinenko and his boss were arrested and charged with “exceeding their authority and ill-treating witnesses”. Litvinenko thus found himself in Lefortovo prison. He later described his first days in prison in a book:
“It was a real shock for me at the beginning. I didn’t sleep at all the first few nights. When I was arrested, the weather was bad, rain mixed with snow. The next day they took me out for air. I looked up at the sky and it was blue. Spring was coming and I was in prison. I was so upset that I demanded to be taken back to my cell. Lefort’s man breaks. There is a negative energy within its walls, because decades ago it was a place for mass executions.”
During the hearings, he was asked to testify against Berezovsky, but refused to do so. This backfired, as he was re-arrested immediately after his release from prison. His wife Marina recounted: “The trial took place on 26 November and journalists surrounded the court. The defence had the last word and the verdict was delivered four hours later. He was acquitted and therefore released. When the court guard opened the door of the cage in which he was held, there was a commotion in the courtroom. A group of armed and masked police officers rushed in and re-arrested him. The television cameras captured the moment when my husband was dragged away from me and one of the policemen hit him with the butt of his rifle. The whole country saw this terrible scene.”
Litvinenko was taken that way to the most notorious prison in Moscow, Butyrka. Although he was released by a military tribunal in mid-December, he was not allowed to leave Moscow and his internal passport was confiscated. But Litvinenko had several other documents hidden away with which he could have travelled. He began to plan his escape, knowing that he would not be left alone.
He has received permission from the police to visit his father in Nalchik, on the Russian side of the Caucasus. Nothing was suspicious, as his wife and son remained in Moscow. It is not known how he got from Nalchik to neighbouring independent Georgia, but he probably obtained a Ukrainian passport. He naively hoped that the Americans would welcome him with open arms.
But times have changed in the meantime. For the West, Russia was already at the beginning of the road to democracy, and the following year George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin met in Ljubljana. Bush was almost enthusiastic about Putin. “I looked into his eyes and knew his soul,” he said. In such a friendly atmosphere, it was difficult to welcome Russian dissidents, to provide them with security, asylum and money to survive, unless they brought big secrets.
Litvinenko’s wife Marina was on a tourist trip to Spain with their son and had no intention of returning to Russia, and Litvinenko was unable to leave Tbilisi. He feared that KGB agents would spot him and kidnap him. Boris Berezovsky, once a friend and now a sworn enemy of Putin, helped him get on British soil.
In England, Litvinenko tried to make contact with other Russian dissidents, but was shunned. He was a KGB officer, not rich like other dissidents, and had never worked with Western intelligence. He also did not drink and carouse around, he was still young and he loved his family. So he was suspicious. But that is why he befriended Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen leader in exile, and told him everything he knew about the crimes that took place in Chechnya during the First and Second Chechen Wars. Litvinenko, as an intelligence officer, was in Chechnya at the time and, as such, was a reliable witness. All this information is to be forwarded to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
In 2001, Litvinenko was granted political asylum in England and started travelling the world. He worked with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating KGB activities in Italy, gave interviews to the BBC’s Russian desk, and worked for a living protecting high-profile figures. 2006 was his most difficult year, but also his most fruitful. His articles on Chechnya were increasingly harsh and reminiscent of those of Anna Politkovskaya, whom he held in high esteem. He visited Georgia again, looking for evidence of Russian bombing of residential buildings in Chechnya. He also gathered information on the mafia activities of some Russian bigwigs and politicians who had spread their tentacles all over Europe, especially in Spain. He also worked closely with Boris Berezovsky. He also began to investigate the irregularities that were taking place in connection with the Yukos Oil Company.
The operation to remove him started a few days after Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. Several FSB men arrived in London from Moscow and Litvinenko began to be secretly monitored. The removal of a Russian dissident with political asylum was to be seen as another showdown between foreign emigrants. But the FSB overlooked an important fact. On 13 October, Litvinenko and his family were granted English citizenship and the murder of an English citizen was already a much more serious matter.
On 16 October, two Russian nationals disembarked from a plane from Moscow, cleared customs and went to a hotel in Soho. Plain-clothes police accompanied them there but found nothing suspicious. The hotel was close to Picadilly Circus, where Litvinenko usually met his colleagues. The two Russians, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun , met him the same day. Lugovoi was a rich man and majority shareholder in a Moscow-based security agency for wealthy clients called Ninth Val, while Kovtun was a former officer of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service.
Lugovoi was convinced that British security agencies would be interested in the Russian market, which was still full of wealthy clients, and Litvinenko, who had also worked in security in Britain, could be a broker in making deals. The two Russians returned to Moscow on 17 October. As it turned out a few weeks later, the hotel where they were staying and the restaurant where they were eating were contaminated with polonium-210. The Russian plane on which they were travelling, however, the Moscow authorities subsequently refused to hand over to the UK so that they could determine whether it was also contaminated.
Radioactive traces were found at Litvinenko only in the afternoon of 1 November. How was it possible that the Russians left so many traces two weeks before they met Litvinenko for the last time on 1 November?
Polonium-210 works
Lugovoi returned to London on 25 October, met Litvinenko and on 28 October travelled back to Moscow on a British Airways flight on which traces of polonium were later detected. Kovtun went to Hamburg and visited his ex-wife, apparently with the intention of mixing up the traces and misleading the investigators. On the first of November, he flew from there to London. German police later searched the Hamburg apartment where he was staying and found traces of polonium there too.
Lugovoi also came to London again, this time with his whole family, and met a Lithuanian man in a hotel. He introduced his new partner, whom Litvinenko was seeing for the first time, and told him about the great business opportunities opening up in customer security and in the sale of liquefied gas and copper to South America. The earnings would be enormous.
Litvinenko left the hotel after the meeting, as did Lugovoi very quickly. The unknown partner he had brought with him told him not to go and disappear, and he would clean up. He put on a mask and protective gloves, and quickly put the teacup and spoon used by Litvinenko into a special bag. He was sure he had left no trace, which was almost impossible. He left the hotel and boarded a boat for Denmark. Traces of radiation were left on the floor of the hotel room.
Towards the end of the day, Litvinenko and Lugovoi met again in the hotel bar to celebrate their future cooperation. Litvinenko was delighted. If the deal succeeded and he got rich, he would no longer have to worry about his family and write boring security reports. He would be independent, well provided for and free. Later, the police found that the bar they were sitting in was the most contaminated place in the whole of London and it took a special team 19 days to clean it up.
The British authorities later found out why they had used polonium and not some other substance. The choice of polonium-210 was well thought out because, unlike other isotopes, it does not emit gamma rays. Gamma energy is what airport scanners are programmed to detect, so they do not detect polonium. In addition, polonium is easy to transport as it looks like water and can be mixed with neutral solutions. Moreover, doctors in the UK had no experience with it, so there was a high probability that Litvinenko’s death would remain unexplained.
Litvinenko returned home at half past seven in the evening, checked his emails and started preparing the gala dinner. It was exactly six years since he and his family set foot on English soil. At eleven o’clock in the evening, he began to die. The next morning, he called Lugovoi and informed him that he would not be at the meeting because he was not feeling well and had a stomach ache. Lugovoi travelled to Moscow the same day.
On 2 November at 2am, Litvinenko asked his wife to call an ambulance because he could no longer bear the pain, was vomiting and could not stand on his feet. Two nurses came, told him to drink more water, took his blood pressure, drew blood for tests and explained that they would do the same in any hospital and that there was no point in moving him in the middle of the night. The next day he was no better and was finally admitted to Barnes Hospital, where he was found to have an inflammation of the stomach and gastrointestinal tract. Tests immediately showed that this was not the case. On 7 November they refused to let him go home, although he told the doctors that he thought he had been poisoned.
Boris Berezovsky also visited him in hospital. Although he had been at the very top of Russian politics for many years and knew who he was dealing with, he too doubted that Litvinenko had been poisoned. The police also did not start an investigation because no one from the hospital informed them that Litvinenko might have been poisoned.
On 11 November, Litvinenko’s hair started falling out, he could no longer speak, his immune system was breaking down and his blood was getting worse. The doctors were convinced that this was due to the strong antibiotics. When his skin turned yellow, they ran more tests to see if he might be infected with HIV, and then transferred him to oncology. The doctors consulted Professor Henry, who had diagnosed the poisoning in Viktor Yushchenko, and he told them that it was probably thallium poisoning, as heavy metals had been detected in Litvinenko’s body.
The police were then alerted, but only after the hospital informed her of the possibility of thallium poisoning. Litvinenko was unceremoniously transferred to UCLH in Euston with an armed escort and began to be questioned.
On 23 November 2006, he was no longer able to speak and his heart stopped twice. He died shortly after 9 pm. Three hours before his death, a specialised laboratory had determined that he was a victim of polonium-210 poisoning. The police visited his wife the same evening and told her that she and her son had to leave the house where they were living. “What’s wrong? For three weeks no one has taken an interest in us, what is happening now?” she wondered. The police explained that they had never encountered a case like this before, that they knew it was polonium, but that they did not actually know what substance they were talking about and what the consequences could be.
The London Metropolitan Police were the first and quickest to come to the rescue, questioning everyone who eventually came into contact with Litvinenko. The press also started to cover the case. Moscow at first stood back and tried to divert the attention of its public to the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Vladimir Putin initially refused to comment on the murder at all, but then said something along the lines of ‘murder is a very serious crime, before society and before God. We will catch the criminals.”
The Kremlin has tried to treat the murder of Litvinenko in the same way and with the same tone. At a press conference in Helsinki, Putin said: ‘Unfortunately, Mr Litvinenko is not Lazarus. Unfortunately, some people are using tragic events for political provocations.” Apparently, Moscow did not expect the name polonium-210 to come up and was therefore rather ill-prepared for the reactions. The very fact that the Russian secret service, the FSB, publicly denied its involvement in Litvinenko’s murder and called the idea nonsense was very strange.
The British government has submitted a request to the Russian Federation for the extradition of Lugovoi, accused of the murder of Litvinenko. The request was rejected because the Russian Federation does not extradite its citizens to foreign countries. Lugovoi and Kovtun have subsequently made successful careers in Russia. Lugovoi is still a wealthy businessman and Kovtun a member of the Russian Duma. In May 2007, Marina Litvinenko filed a lawsuit against the Russian Federation at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, alleging that Russia had violated her husband’s right to life and failed to carry out a full investigation.
